At our August 15th meeting, Lauren Wingert will talk about the many modifications you can make to your astronomy equipment to make it easier to use and more productive. Lauren writes: “When I got my first scope in 2019 I was pretty excited because I saw Jupiter with its moons, the sparkle of M13, and Saturn with its rings in my first session. I also noticed a sore neck the very next day and realized it was my bending over to look through the red dot finder that caused it. My immediate thought was…How can I make this better? I’ve had that mindset from the start: How can I make this gear work better and easier? So I thought I would share some of the problems I faced and how they led to thinking up solutions and modifications that I made to my gear to solve them. Some of them were pretty innovative and ended up in Sky & Telescope magazine and some modifications I did are pretty ordinary. I will describe the almost 20 mods I made to an XT10 Dobsonian, showing how problems are fixable and sometimes you can make that scope work better.”

The meeting is at 7:00 on Thursday, August 15th at the Eugene Science Center planetarium, 2300 Leo Harris Parkway in Eugene (behind Autzen Stadium). Note that construction near Autzen stadium may close the west entrance to Leo Harris Parkway, so you might have to go around to the east end. Also note that the gated entrance at the stop light on the east end leads to the stadium, not the Science Center. You want to go beyond that to the actual entrance to Leo Harris Parkway.